Poly Townhouse, Guangzhou

About the Project

Italians always consider the kitchen as the core of the house, one of grandma’s stews can gather the whole family together. Finnish are huge fans of wooden furniture, one handcrafted baby’s cot inside the garage means so much paternal love. Home is the fortress of our life, the most important place for holding the family together, the connection in between every member of the family is neither marble nor veneer, but every livable living scene and the daily fragments of our deep memory for which we can often remember.We never use “ideal home” as a scheme for our mock-up house design, it's a kind of impossible to realize, because “ideal” can be really different for different people, and always depends by some personal emotions and memories. So during the design process, the house was just supposed to be “a friend’s home” by us, and then it just became alive after that , we think we have to find a space for him to drink alone, and also there should be a tree inside the courtyard for his son, etc.For an alive residence, it is more than a container which is divided by living room, bedroom, bathroom, there should be sincere feelings and colors inside, bustling, or leisurely, or introspective, or take the time elements morning, noon, sunset as a reference for space design.We just set several possibilities of daily life arbitrarily inside the house hereby, it has to be left for the family to take decades of their life to fill in for their ideal home from the other side.

What’s unique about it

For this house, we sliced the 4 storeys villa vertically into left and right 2 sides, put the circulation and bathrooms into the left side, we installed a tilted staircase with a 9 meters’ climbing wall which can be another circulation for each floor; for the right side, there are different life stages for each storey, from basement to rooftop, from public to private.We picked large amount of white oak for the left side, and partly extended it to the right side for paving with white plaster on the wall and ceiling, to form a warm atmosphere, based on that, frosted glass and luminous film was interweaved with the sunlight from windows of the right and skylight of the left, to make the existing dense space more 3dementionaly transparent and open.Kenya Hara said that the most pleased space inside his house where he lived for more that 20 years was his small library just like an aircraft cockpit. We think that private spaces is more needed by modern families nowadays, this house has not only ordinary space for a family living together, but also customized private space for each of the family member, such as kids’ playroom on the 2nd floor, or the library/closet which can be completely open to the terrace.For these private spaces, consider to the scale of the house, we still tried to make the space constant, by using the semi-transparent material or the floating partition in between the functional spaces, just made the habitant inside feel the connecting of the house.